Einstein and Individuation as Isolation

“My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years. Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations”.

-Einstein, in Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch. 3, “The World which Beckons like a Liberation”, p27 (possible references for this quote are found on p369, sorry for the ambiguity but the quote isn’t specifically referenced)

Einstein was obviously a “man who had learned to distinguish between what had been drummed into him and what he had acquired by his own experience and knowledge” .

The individual is a mountain whose peak becomes more isolated the higher it reaches.

-Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation, 1965

On Conflict

“Violating Consensus”, in Verb Crisis vol. 6. NY: Actar 2008. p168.

Markus Miessen interviews Chantal Mouffe (Belgian political theorist).

(p170): “Conflict can thus be understood not as a form of protest or provocation, but rather as a micro-political practice through which participants become active agents in the force field they are facing.”

Conflict can never be overcome. It can only be tamed into a manageable equilibrium.

The outsider,

The bohemian,

The disagreer,

The dissenter,

The different point of view,

This person allows others to see things differently.

(Artists, architects – people engaged in the entire field of culture-at-large – play this role.)

The Anthroposphere and Timespace

People (the anthroposphere) affect timespace.

EXAMPLE 1 (In Travel):

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together.

This is a reminder, not in that large groups are more robust, thus giving them further staying power, but rather, large groups are slow. The more people there are, the slower it is.

EXAMPLE 2 (At a Restaurant):

A party of five takes about 1-2hrs to eat, drink and be merry. A party of ten takes over 2hrs, and a party of thirteen almost 3hrs. The more the merrier (and the longer they take).

Makes one consider civilization and its relationship to the exponential growth of technology, but most importantly, that people exert some type of force on timespace.

I Prefer Tactility

“The Internet is great but I prefer things that are tactile.”

-Jamie Reed interview, Juxtapoz Magazine, Apr2011, n123, p79

The importance of the tactility of a visual message becomes everstrengthening in an era of digital dematerialization. To see the message in your environment, your real environment, is to make a more holistic, visceral, direct connection.

The Illusion

[Thursday, February 10, 2011]

It is the year 2100. The world is in flux. Large numbers of people are being redistributed, both by choice and by the manipulation of the vast social engineering apparatus, or, as those who know call it – The Illusion. There are those who live outside the illusion and those who live inside. Cultures are designed. Long ago, cultures were fermented over time. Now, time does not exist, at least in that sense.

In the illusion things don’t progress in a simple trajectory, they don’t ebb and flow like the tides. Instead, this life is a repetition of the same thing over and over. The façade changes, tastes change, neighborhoods and relationships change, but they do so only to uphold the illusion of the passing of time. Beyond the façade, the system remains in a state of static equilibrium. No revolutions, no triumph. No hindsight, no dreams. People experience conflict, but only that which is designed as such. True conflict does not exist. The fluctuation of reality, of Activity versus Dormancy, Aggression versus Cooperation, Love versus Hate, and Right versus Wrong, as they push and pull on the path of time, have been reduced to an unwavering horizontal line. All life continues unchanged by the unfolding of events.

But this is not life. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows that we must see night and day in order to maintain mental stability. Everyone knows that we must slumber and awaken to maintain physical cohesion. Just as this is known, so it is for the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, it is engineered into the daily ongoings of the life of the submitting population.

In a sense, they choose to live this way. They understand the necessity for cyclical change and submit to the illusions that have been so thoughtfully articulated for their well-being. It is not blissful paradise, though some choose a more seductive version of the illusion. It is not base destitution, though some are cunningly diverted into the upper realms of poverty. For the most part, it is life as usual. Unthinkable crime and horror have been minimized, though with it, unforeseeable epiphanies and ecstasy. That is not to say that these do not exist, just that they are managed, controlled. Ultimately, they, none of them, ever happen. Nothing happens. Plants grow, wind blows, and insects crawl in crooked lines, but all of this has been arranged. This has all been done for the betterment of humankind, for the Greater Good.

Now, there are some who deny the illusion. That is not to say that they deny one illusion for another, as most do – that is, in itself, a false choice. But no, these others, they live, painfully, in the Constant Now. This Now does not supply spirit-nourishing change. Love is not made stronger by the vanquishing of hate. Silence does not exist, for there is no unrest. These others, they choose this life, this non-life, again and again, moment after moment, in a battle of self preservation vs. self destruction.

Life outside the illusion is not long. Those who walk away face hardships for which the coping mechanisms required have been bred out of them for generations. Those who turn their backs also lose their connectivity to the anthroposphere, the collective will to live that people propagate amongst themselves and which is the fuel that propels human life through the barrier of time and into the future.

These are those who orbit the anthroposphere, who surround it in a web of purpose supported only by their own belief in an underlying force – a threat. They claim to feel its danger, to see its light coming on the horizon. They are dismissed. “They feel too much”, it is said. They are known to travel throughout space in the way memories slide through our minds. The population at large is told to stay away from them, both physically and mentally, for they creep. They create thought, but not full thoughts as we are used to – fragmented thoughts, half-thoughts that require another human like themselves to come together into a fully formed idea, but at the risk of remaining forever unfinished and unanswered. Their creeping thoughts represent a bubble rising to the surface, bursting and rippling its wake outwards to crash on the shores of the collective consciousness. They are disruptive.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about them at this time. They disrupt our way of life and their numbers grow with the passing of the days, more creeping, feeling, thinking people. They leave us because they are afraid, and they make us afraid.

On Second Thought

(…After all,) Abstract Expressionism is just an extension of Abstraction. A similar connection between the two can be found in the relation of graffiti to the greater street art movement. Graffiti was a total abstraction of a concept crystallized in Abstract Art: the painting was the art itself, not the image portrayed by that painting. As CEPT determines in his 2011 Juxtapoz interview, “Writing graffiti is just actually signing the landscape and declaring it art. As Duchamp did with the urinal…” If Abstract Art released artists of the obligation to make art out of the visual representation of physical reality, then Street Art rendered impotent the social enforcement of art as a thing at all. Street Art is no longer just one separation away from its environment, just as Abstract Art, by lack of its representational quality, was no longer two separations away. Evaporate the narrative or representational quality of the pre-modern era and you have left the art as an object – an empty object, but a thing nonetheless. It’s a vessel for nothing. Abstract Art says, “Go ahead, art is just a vessel for your ideas. Put whatever you want in there. Put nothing at all. Go ahead, it’s ok”.

Graffiti, on the other hand, totally dematerializes the temple of art. You sign the landscape, I look at the wall you wrote it on, and the window above, and the building adjacent, and I zoom further, and see the whole block, and etc. The art is no longer a non-representational, ethereal entity presented in a vessel of human intent. The tag, the signature of the graffiti artists, says, “Look at this, all of it. I own this. I am this. This is what I feel”. Logically, the street artist of the 21^st century says, “If this is all mine, let me play with it”. And so, the need for art to be contained and presented is negated. No need for that. In fact, real street art can’t even be bought and sold; it is nearly integrated into us; it barely exists.

NOTES

Mike Ballard – CEPT interview in Juxtapoz, Jan 2011 n 120 p100.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/

Socialism and Abstract Art vs. Capitalism and the Street Art/Uncommissioned Art Movement

The revolution has not been televised.

In an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Michael Gondry (artist, filmmaker) talks about growing up in France watching Bulgarian/Russian cartoons, how communism was good for art and that the free world doesn’t make very good art because they have to be so concerned with its commercial aspect. He points out that they have to sustain their viewing audience, whereas in the communist world the audience has no choice of which cartoons to watch. This gives the artists more creative freedom.

Concerning the art of our time, this poses a conflict. It’s now 2011, and Capitalism is the dominant socioeconomic system of our global society, not Communism. In this system, artists can only create what sells. In contrast, the role of the artist in society is to show people the way, to uncover the future. More precisely, they focus the zeitgeist, presenting it in a way that can be understood by the non-artist citizenry. Art is a coping mechanism, a medicine. If this is so, then how can artists give people only what they want if what they deliver is that which people do not yet know they need?

In a socialist society, people do not choose their art. Instead, the governing body takes care of the funding, and the artists do their job. Only in such a system could Abstract Art have been born. There is no way the people would have chosen such an insane premise as this: Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). If this is so, then how does a revolutionary art movement take form out of the Capitalist ether?

Perhaps some discourse on Abstract Expressionism is in order; but that is too easy, and becoming less relevant to the real question at hand. Instead, we turn to the street art phenomenon of the 21^st century. The 1990’s suburban American youth still had to trek out to New York City to get graffiti magazines. Then Nicholas Ganz publishes Graffiti World (2004), a graffiti artist’s bible. What was more impressive – the art within or the fact that such a compendium could be published in the first place? Street Art From Five Continents? Then Bansky. He redefines (or perhaps succinctly defines for the first time) the Street Art movement we now know. He releases Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), and writes the preface to Trespass (2010), a 320-page fullcolor book by behemoth art publisher Taschen. What’s happening here? Artists are straightup tagging canvases, putting them in galleries, and selling them to celebrities. Shepard Fairey will probably have his own reality TV show by the end of this year. We’re saturated.

Street Art has taken over as the dominant art form of the young 21^st Century just as Abstract Art had done in the 20^th, but this time Capitalist society is the breeding ground. Restating the original question: How can artists, whose role it is to give the public an understanding of a world which they have yet to comprehend, how can they deliver in a Capitalist society which requires investment based on speculated success and consumer demand? The answer is simple. Street artists are forcing a quasi-socialist system upon us by creating the art for free.

That’s it. You won’t invest? You won’t take our medicine? No problem (just remember what happened to Nurse Rached). And so, here comes art, like it or not, just as it always has, in your face and against your will. The empty space left by the fallen wall of Berlin was first shown to us as a Black Square. “Do you want to fall not knowing who took you?” (That's more of a threat than a question).

NOTES:

“Do you want to fall…?”, Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays in Trespass…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer

Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art

Carlo McCormick (author), Marc and Sara Schiller (curators), Ethel Seno (editor)

Taschen 2010, 320 pages

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/05719/facts.trespass_a_history_of_uncommissioned_urban_art.htm

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010

http://www.banksyfilm.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents, Nicholas Ganz. Abrams, 2004.

http://www.amazon.com/Graffiti-World-Street-Five-Continents/dp/0810949792

Michael Gondry interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2011 n 120 pp 66-75.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/